Foul-play crackdown a gripping tale in the NBA
The game is going on and everything looks normal until some NBA official blows the whistle, calls a foul and everyone thinks, “Oh, no, here we go again.”
The calls are flow-killers. They happen away from the ball, where nobody seems to be watching except a referee, and it’s taking everyone involved some time to get used to.
Maybe they will get used to it, maybe they won’t, but right now the new “point of education” around the league — which places a strict prohibition on grabbing an offensive player to impede his progress away from the ball — is at times infuriating.
“We’ve got to adjust, we’ve got to accept it and we’ve got to learn as quickly as possible, but it’s not easy to make a big rule change like that,” Raptors head coach Nick Nurse said this week.
“Now you’re out in a battle and exactly the opposite of what we’ve been teaching. Everybody’s been teaching grab, hold, don’t let ’em cut, get physical, keep your hands on him at all times, all that stuff.”
That was all well and good and part of the game until the league decided it wanted more movement, more scoring, more cutting.
And more fouls.
“Everyone is trying to figure out — you could call a foul on every play because there is contact on every play — what’s being called and what’s not being called,” Minnesota Timberwolves coach Tom Thidodeau said. “The offensive players are able to get away with a lot more than the defensive players are, in terms of using your shoulders, pushing off, things they do to create space. So if we’re cleaning up the defence, we also have to clean up the offence. I think the idea behind it is good, creating more movement. It places more of the emphasis on offensive fundamentals, and I think the same will hold true for the defence.”
The key to solving the issue is twofold and, if history holds, it’ll get figured out.
Referees might eventually start to let a modicum of grabbing go because they feel the flow being sapped out of games and don’t want to blow their whistles on every play over borderline infractions. And players might ultimately learn what they can and can’t get away with.
It’s happened in the past with other “points of emphasis” and rule changes which took away all kinds of incidental contact on post play and hand-checking. But until either of those things occurs, arenas will be full of the toot, toot, toot of whistles and exasperated players away from the ball knowing they got caught.
“They emphasize it, and it may dwindle over the year but I think it’s something that they’ll look for. Especially if guys are used to getting those calls early in the year and they’re not getting them later in the year, there will be some complaints about it,” Raptor Danny Green said. “We have to adapt and adjust as players defensively. Obviously people want to see high-scoring games where people score a lot of points. A lot of the time, the offence has the first initial hit, and your first reaction when you fall is to grab somebody. Or they grab you and they only see the defence sometimes. We’ve got to use it to our advantage offensively and practise playing defence without using our hands.”
That ability to demonstrate hands-free defence could end up being the key.
If officials see defenders’ mitts in the air, they’ll know they can’t be holding. Then the game can flow at will.
“We’ve all got to get our hands up in the air and show them to the ref, that we’re not holding and using them and adjust as quick as we can,” Nurse said.